


Left In The Dark

by lumalore



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, M/M, One Shot, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumalore/pseuds/lumalore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuing their search for freedom from the clutches of Purgatory, Dean and Cas run into an unexpected, but familiar face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Wandering Through Purgatory Group Challenge #1](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/17900) by Multiple (follow the link to view contributors!). 



> AN (9/2/12): With one day remaining until the return of Supernatural, I decided to polish off a Destiel drabble I wrote a while back (way before any of the spoilers clued anyone in on how Purgatory was gonna go down) in collaboration with several other lovely writers in a reverse bang chain-fic challenge. For the original collab, click the link above. Enjoy! ~

A streak of some dark light tears across Dean’s vision and he jerks to a halt, grabbing Cas by the arm as the air shivers with a foreign rawness. Purgatory was indifferent to impossibilities, but this one defied everything they’d seen yet.

“The hell was that?” he asks. In all their searching, they’d come across nothing so ferocious. It was enormous, like a skyscraper with the might of a god. Dean looks at Cas. The angel’s eyes are wide with shock and something like hope. Suddenly, he’s shoved off Dean and is vaulting through the stirring mists. “Goddammit,” Dean mutters, sprinting after him. He nearly overtakes him, but Cas abruptly hauls him back.

“What is it? What’s wrong? Do you know what it is?”

Cas nods and swallows a bitter guilt. “It’s Balthazar. Or what’s left of him.”

Indifferent to impossibilities indeed. “Balthazar? But how?”

Cas speaks distantly, his thoughts disconnected. “A fragment of his Grace must have splintered off when I… I killed him just before the Leviathans…” He trails off, eyeing the shifting remains of his old friend. “It must have hid within me…maybe that was what gave me the power to resist them for as long as I did …It was a mistake, I see that now. I thought he’d betrayed me when really I had only been betraying myself…the bees taught me that. Such a happy family they were…”

Dean allows him a moment of silence. “Cas, we should go.” He places a restraining hand on the angel’s shoulder.

“No. …no, please. Let me speak with him. You may not have accepted my apologies, but that doesn’t mean he won’t. We were once brothers after all.”

“And we’re not?” Dean mutters. He would have done anything for that game of Sorry now.

“Perhaps angels are not so different from bees, Dean. …But you are neither so I think it’s best for you to stay here,” the angel cautions, removing Dean’s hand from his shoulder.

Castiel approaches the swirling mass of shadow and smoke with reserved purpose in his stride. A tinge of nausea sweeps over Dean as he looks on, the air dark and heavy with the acridity seeping slowly from the roiling, shifting imprint of the angel no more. The world ripples where Balthazar stands, but Castiel seems entirely unaffected or unconcerned by the vertigo Dean must shake off. We should have gone. We should have left him here in the dark and gone.

“So you want to talk?” says Balthazar, the words twisted and leering, rattling inside Dean’s ears. “You know there’s no need. I know your heart already. I have moved beyond it now, beyond your cage of a vessel, beyond the shackles of familial obedience and so-called angelic omniscience. But I remember it all. What use are words when it’s all been said and done and you are none the wiser for it?”

“If that is your version of Truth, so be it.” Castiel replies grimly. “You may not think me wiser, but surely, if you claim to know my heart, you must also know my sorrow.” He appears lucid once more, but then averts his gaze and Dean remembers that he remains transformed by the half-lunacy of Lucifer’s torment, that he is not protected, that there is no such thing as mercy here and that there is no shame in running. Dean swallows, both frozen and urged to flee by fear fast-pumping in his ears. Fuck fight or flight, the bestial Fallen of Purgatory would find them no matter. 

“I felt no sorrow inside you, Castiel.” Balthazar’s words are a searing hiss. “I searched, fought against the writhing souls suffocating each other, but all I ever found was ireful wrath and spite and bitterness left to fester in the dark. All your suppressed hatred at our Father, at those who blindly followed Him, at those who turned away but not towards you. You were a chasm of endless and inescapable fury.”

“I was a fool,” Castiel agrees. “What I did was wrong, and a part of me knew it all along. Warranted or not, the urge to rebel is a childish one. I regret the means I resorted to. You know as well as anyone that beyond its fleeting liberation, betrayal is a double-edged gambit. I should not have bet on such a risky move; I see now we have all lost the war. And I will forever be at war with myself because of it.”

“As it should be,” Balthazar answers in a warped whisper.

Castiel’s nod is half-shrouded in the poisonous haze that balloons between them. Dean coughs into his sleeve, eyes watering, and Cas turns to him, poorly stifled anguish etched into his face. The angel’s eyes are damp too, but Dean knows it’s not from the smolder of Balthazar’s Grace.

“I may have played the Devil’s Advocate during my time on Earth, but that is nothing to playing God as you did, dear brother,” Balthazar spits. He moves forward, the ground beneath his feet shriveling into some bizarre further lifelessness. Smoke begins to curl upwards from the soil and Dean backs away, his half-choking ignored. “And even so, I was loyal to you, Castiel. I was loyal even though I was wary of your plan. I warned you, I trusted you. I only tried to stop you to save you from yourself. And still, you saw fit to kill me.”

Castiel holds his ground. “I am sorry,” he murmurs. “I am changed now. I see how betrayal usurped my mind. More than anyone, I deserve to be here. This is not a fate I would wish on anyone, least of all my brother, tainted and fallen though you might be. As am I.”

“Fallen?” Balthazar sneers, smoke billowing around him in a furious inferno. “I am not Fallen. I am both dead and beyond Death’s stampede. I am not an angel. I am more ruined than a Revenant, yet more powerful and glorious than any of those monstrosities. I have not Fallen from Grace- I am Grace, I am the Ugly Truth; I am the manifestation of Retribution! Do you think you can slay me a second time?”

“I told you- I am changed now. I don’t want to fight. I watch the bees, only there are none in Purgatory.”

“What about this little bee?” Balthazar cackles cruelly, and in a torrent of smoke he is embracing Dean from behind, a clammy, rotted hand at Dean’s throat. “I seem to remember you being quite a pest back in your world, Dean.” Balthazar exhales with punishing pleasure into Dean’s ear, his breath noxious and scorching. The vapors enveloping them nearly overwhelm Dean, but through the heat and dizziness and the impish shadows prancing gleefully in the smoke whipping past his face he can make out Castiel’s. He holds onto it as if it will help him hold onto his consciousness, watches the angel shouting desperately, a familiar hard glint suddenly eradicating the fear in his eyes as he breaks into a sprint, and all at once another blackness, a velvety, plumose, fierce and almighty blackness bursts across his vision and Dean is falling and Cas is flying and Balthazar is fading, evaporated by the feathery blackness that also takes Dean for its own.

Dean opens his eyes to endless gray. It sharpens, pricks at his vision like needles. He wants the blackness back, because it’s better than the gray, better than the half-life he’d clung to back on the topsy-turvy topside to keep from falling off the edge. And so he prays for darkness, that sweet nothingness that fills him up even in its emptiness. Paradox in Purgatory knows no absolution. And neither does he.

“Dean.” Castiel’s voice brushes him like a shadow, another gray murmur mixing with the rest. Dean closes his eyes against it, but the night behind his lids shifts with spiteful colors and offers no more respite. “Dean, I need to rest. We can’t go on like this; we’ll be caught if we don’t recover our strength soon. It’s fight or flight, not both. Dean, please. Stay with me.”

Stay with Cas. He longs to be left in the dark, but he knows it will only make things worse, just like it did with Sammy. Fight or flight, not both. He forces himself into consciousness. Cas is holding him in his arms, gliding haltingly on an airless current. A swirling angry haze of the not-quite-sky swathes them in a shadow storm. The battered silhouette of the angel’s wings flutters in and out of being, shadow on shade, ghosts in the gloom, a phantom eclipse that fascinates as it frightens, much as his vessel once did so long ago. And then he realizes. The blackness had been Cas, the charred fleeting shadow of the might he’d once possessed, an apparition he for once didn’t want to slay.

Dean feels Cas straining to stay aloft, but his flickering wings crumple, and they half-fall back to the miserable earth to mingle with its endless stretch of wretchedness. Dean wishes it was enough to hide them. It might blend with the colors of his heart, but it does nothing to silence its beating. Like Purgatory, his body is broken but remains a cage to which he wants not to belong. But he can’t let his life be snuffed out yet. Because Castiel needs him to stay. And so the monsters will keep coming, drawn to the displaced rhythm inside him that too screams “Stay!” because he deserves to, just as he deserves his broken angel and the infinite plaguing gray of this in-between less-than-half-life that rejects and binds all at once. There is no solitude in stillness here, because there is no stillness to begin with. Either they are moving, or Purgatory is. Fight or flight, not both. He can’t stay, he can’t go. Yet he must continue. Fight it is. It always is. Because no matter how it wavers, Purgatory never ends, and neither can he. Not when he’s the only light left in the dark.


End file.
